Hacker News Reader

Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

At the teacher level, they are underpaid. My girlfriend is a high school teacher w/ 4 years experience, a masters degree in her topic, and works 12+ hours a day (not kidding, seriously all day).

She makes $35k / year.

How much do teachers in her school system who have 25 years experience make?

The union-mandated tenure system, which prevents young, talented teachers from making even vaguely competitive salaries, but rewards older, mediocre teachers with "time served" is part of what's stopping "more money" from being the answer. Higher teacher salaries under the current system would largely reward the oldest, not the best.

View on HN

In my school district[0] teachers start at $43,500 and max out at $63,688 (after 30 years and a PhD)

You can pick up some extra stipends if you coach or work in certian departments (STEM) but good luck getting into 6 digits as a Teacher.

When I taught in Massachusetts (where we have a teacher union)[1] pay starts at $36,400 and maxes out at $74,000 (with a PhD) after 19 years.

Turns out that public school salary information is public information. So if you "know" a teacher that is making 6 digits, I challenge you to look up their pay scale and see if you really know what you think you know.

[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B27mc-sxcu8ldW9OTHlLMjZ0SlU... [1] http://www.pittsfield.net/UserFiles/Servers/Server_1051846/F...

For the record, I didn't make the "6 digit salaries" claim. I'd be thrilled if world-class (or even top 5-10%) teachers could command those kinds of rates without having to teach in the richest school districts for decades.

I'd also note that those are salaries (and similar for others in this discussion) are for 187-day school calendars, or 37.4 weeks/year. Generously applying the same rate to a 46 week/year "full time" calendar puts the top end in Round Rock at over $78,000. The median household income in Round Rock is around $70,000[1], suggesting that it isn't outrageous for a couple of married teachers there to earn well above average, even without summer income.

Also, at least in MA, many teachers are not required to pay Social Security tax, but instead pay into a much more generous pension system. Other benefits are also competitive relative to the private sector.

Again, though, I'm all for teachers making more money so more talented people are encouraged to teach. But the tenure system is not the way to get that result.

[1] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/48/4863500.html

ugh, summer argument.

First: teachers typically work days not on the student's school calendar, so it's more like 39 or so weeks by your calculation.

Second: they work WAY more than an 8 hour day. Last night she did 7am - 4pm in the building, then 2 or so hours at night grading. (and that was a light day since she had gotten her planning done previously this weekend).

Third: summer is where you can finally catch up and plan classes. Girlfriend did a major revamp of her AP US History class so she was in-line with the new standards. Last year was Western Civ revamp. Next year will be the standard US History class.

You're right, benefits are in-line (not better, just in-line) with corporate america. Mediocre, but existing health care. A pension style retirement plan that's reasonable, but at the mercy of underfunding by politicians (which seems to be expected at this point).

http://www.governing.com/columns/public-money/FICA-free-lunc...

Well, you can easily look up NYC teacher salaries. They start at $50k and go up to $105k. http://schools.nyc.gov/NR/rdonlyres/2712AB02-A1EF-4CE2-B879-...

When you take into account the shorter work day/work year http://www.uft.org/new-teachers/your-work-day-and-year

really good benefits, including a $50-$60k a year pension (http://www.empirecenter.org/publications/pension-calculator/) and essentially tenure...well, it's not too bad...

Why shouldn't it be 'not too bad'? For NYC that's the lower end of middle class- comparable to being in a (unionized) trade. And I can guarantee the teachers put up with more shit than a plumber.

I'm pretty sure plumbers deal with more shit. Literally.

lol if you think teachers have a "shorter work day/work year"

My girlfriend is a High School teacher in NY, and easily works more than I do. You have to factor in planning and grading which is all done after "work".

Well, average actual hours worked in the US is around 1800 (that's net after sick days, vacation, personal days, etc.) https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS Given (in NYC) a school day of 6.33 hours (including lunch) and a school year of 18x days, then subtract personal days and the like...well.

Also, most teachers don't need to do as much planning after a few years. Is if fair that longer serving teachers get paid twice as much as new ones, when new ones put in more hours usually? Well...

Most teachers aren't teachers after a few years[0] so most teachers do not benefit from having old lesson plans, most teachers are not making the upper levels of salary, and most teachers will never collect on their not-social-security-pensions.

The school day may be 6.33 hours (including lunch) but do you only count football players as working 3 hours a week when you watch them on TV? Teachers have to do a lot of "under the table" work to make those 6.33 hours (including lunch) happen.

When are those tests getting graded? When are those struggling students getting extra help? When are those lesson plans getting written? When are those parent-teacher conferences happening? When are those teachers going to football games/plays/other events to make connections with the students? When are those teachers writing letters of recommendation for those students? When are those lesson plans being modified to meet the needs of students with IEPs? When are those lesson plans being modified to meet the needs of ESL students? When are the formative and summative assessments being analyzed to modify lesson plans to better meet the needs of the students?

Those 6.33 hours (including lunch) are just the hours that teachers spend in front of the camera. There is so much more work involved to support those 6.33 hours (including lunch). Even for the long tenured teachers. If a teacher is resting on their laurels and just rehashing old lesson plans, then that's one of the "bad ones".

[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/03/30/395322012/the-hidd...

It is a crying shame that there is so much teacher churn...why is that? In the article you reference, it's actually not primarily related to compensation, but to autonomy, support, and student behavioral issues.

Yes, of course, like I said, there are many outside the class hours. And in fact, 6.33 hours/d are not the "hours in front of the camera" (I assume you mean instructional hours.) The exact number is a bit hazy, due to self-reporting issues, but it seems to be about 700 h/y. http://cbcse.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/The-Mi...

It's hard to say why there is so much churn. The churn related to changing schools pretty much can't be about pay because you get paid the same amount no matter where you teach unless to change districts, and even then you might only get a couple hundred dollars a year more. But changing schools can get you a better administration or a better pool of students to work with.

However, if you get offered a 9-5 job for $100,000 and you are looking at making $48,000 after several years experience ... you start imagining what you could do with an extra $50,000 a year. Just think of the compound interest!!!

If you can make lots of money, you almost owe it to yourself to get it. But who does that leave us to educate the kids that are going to run the country when we are old? Do we really want to leave that job up to people who can't do anything but teach (so they live and die by the dreaded tenure system) and people who don't have experience teaching (and will soon leave to make money in industry)?

Also, not all states have unions or tenure (my state included) and those states to not have industry-competitive salaries and they do not provide better educations. If unions were the problem, wouldn't we see better results from non-union states? Wouldn't it behove non-union school districts to out perform/compete union school districts to keep teachers from unionizing? (or is the fact that they can get laws passed saying that teachers cannot unionize better than trying to be competitive in the job seeker market?)

Let's talk about the teacher's work day.

Your link says it's 6 hours and 55 minutes, including lunch. So 6 hours and 25 minutes is a work day.

Plus there's 150 minutes a week (2 and a half hours, or 30 minutes per day) for training, professional development, teacher collaboration, parent engagement and other professional activities.

150 minutes for all of that is a joke, and if any teacher was actually following that rule (union or not) then you'd be hearing about it.

What are "other professional activities?

Students that need extra help? Students that need to make up work/tests? Grading homework/tests/quizzes

I have about 150 students. If I give a test, that's 150 tests to grade. If it takes me 1 minute to grade each test, then I've just blown that entire quota of "other professional activities"

But I still do my job.

I grade all those 150 tests. Then I grade the homework that I gave all those students. Then I write my lesson plans for the next classes and I write the next test. And I email/call parents. And I meet with parents. And I see students before/after school to answer their questions and have them make up their work and tests. And I answer emails from students that have questions about their homework.

I spend 6 hours and 25 minutes a day teaching. I spend plenty more time making sure students learn.

But at least I get summer vacation, right? Sure, it's just full of mandatory Professional Development (so I can keep my teacher license up to date) and lesson planning for the next year.

But hey, in New York you can make up to $105k! After 22 years AND earning a PhD (which you paid for with your own money ... and where did you find the time to get that degree?) Rent in NY is 3x rent where I live, but the max $105k isn't even 3x the starting salary of my school district.

That's for nurses, etc. It's 6 hours and 20 minutes for regular teachers (including lunch). Actual instruction hours per day are quite a bit less of course.

Even for someone without more advanced degrees (fyi you do not need a PhD to cap out.) you cap out at $93k. Agreed that teachers (particularly beginner teachers) put in a lot of hours outside school. 10 hours a week? More? So a 40-50 hour workweek during the school year? (But with predictable scheduling, which not all professionals have.)

A roughly $1 MM dollar annuity when you retire isn't so horrible either.

Lesson planning takes less time as you get more experienced, plus you reuse your old lesson plans.

175 hours every five years for required professional development? http://www.uft.org/q-issues/maintaining-your-professional-ce...

Did I miss anything? COL in NYC is definitely higher...but you do not have to live in Manhattan. There are many affordable areas in NYC.

I've worked for a big insurance company, a medium sized company that went public, and a couple startups, and two school districts.

I made waaaaay more money working in industry and never worked anywhere near as hard or long as I do being a teacher.

Sure, lesson planning gets easier. And you can reuse old lesson plans (although, the standards get changed fairly regularly and in my district you need to use "data-driven metrics" to improve your lesson plans year after year, so if you're just reusing lesson plans you get put on the "bad teacher list" in a state with no unions which means no tenure).

Without the PdD, you don't cap out at that 6 digit number. But $93k isn't bad. That's about the entry level salary of a Software Enigneer, right? And you only need to be a teacher for 20 years to earn that. What a deal!

That's probably all a teacher deserves though. As a society we really need incentivise our best and brightest to use their skills to build new ways to share photos.

All I'm saying is that you get what you pay for. If you pay teachers $40k, then you're going to get $40k value.

No, you do not need a PhD to cap out. It's a Masters + 30 credits. http://schools.nyc.gov/Offices/DHR/TeacherPrincipalSchoolPro...

One of my bêtes noires about the system is that it does not differentiate between a high school teacher getting an advanced degree in STEM versus a kindergarten teacher getting a secondary development blah blah from University of Phoenix.

My personal opinion is that some teachers are underpaid, and some are overpaid. Senior teachers should not be making twice as much as junior teachers, and high school physics teachers should not make the same as kindergarten teachers. Additionally, schools should have some leeway in rewarding better/harder working teachers, instead of the unionized lockstep pay scales.

Yes, programmers make more than teachers, on average. (Though the mean hourly wages are not that different, actually-- http://www.bls.gov/ncs/ocs/sp/ncbl1614.pdf for NY/NJ/CT). So?

Programmers make more than teachers, so someone that is any good at programming is better off being a programmer than a teacher. Which leaves people who don't know how to program to teach high school kids to program.

Which is why everyone is a "self taught" programmer.

Imaging if you took everyone that posts to Hacker News about how they were the only person in their school that knew how a computer worked and they did all sorts of hacks and had all sorts of fun subverting authority and you went back in time and you gave them a knowledgeable mentor (read: teacher) how much better would they be at programming now?

It's 2015 and we don't have those teachers in our schools. What we have are Math teachers that are being told "We have to have a Computer Science class and we heard that programming is like math, so you're going to be teaching Computer Science next year. Go take a Java course."[0]

Also, unions are not keeping the pay scales the way they are. Texas does not have unions. Texas does not have tenure. Texas still has "lock step pay scales". Unions are not the problem.

Private schools pay teachers less than Public Schools. Private Schools don't have unions. Unions are not the problem.

I don't know what the problem is. I think it has something to do with there being very little respect or prestige for the teaching profession among tax payers (or anybody, really). But the problem isn't unions. If unions were the problem, then the problem wouldn't exist in places where there are no unions.

[0] 100% serious. I had a training this summer where 6 of the other 7 teachers were Math teachers that were told at the end of the year that they would be teaching AP Computer Science and were sent off to take their first ever Java course over the summer.

How much do teachers in her school system who have 25 years experience make?

In my state, which has comparable starting salaries, $56k assuming they obtained some professional certification along the way. Otherwise, $50k. (For comparison, an engineer straight out of college could expect to make maybe $75k.)

I find the idea that we should destroy the entire school system to ensure that a small handful of undeserving people are not able to serve out their career on a still-very-modest salary quite mad.

Yeah, wait until these Javascript beasting brogrammers reach 35- all of a sudden experience will become much more valuable to them.

Given 20 years, and a doctorate degree $65k. Beyond 20, it goes to letters on the pay scale, and I'm not sure what the requirements are to move up that.

No teachers in this district are making money suitable to their training and experience.

This - I know teachers with 25 years experience making close to six figures, which seems fairly insane.

Why shouldn't a teacher with 25 years experience not make six figures, or close to it?

Because it's a function of tenure, and not job performance?

So they never performed well? Very few jobs have pay that directly correlates to current performance.

What school district? Teacher salary is public knowledge. There are very few states that pay teachers 6 digits.

If you put more money into the system, you could be pretty sure that the teachers would not see more than a dime of it. Tenure is what prevents schools from removing a higher cost experienced teacher and replacing them with a cheaper no experienced teachers.

Microsoft and Google don't fire all their higher cost experienced engineers in favor of cheaper fresh graduates every year. They also don't forbid new engineers from making more than any longer-tenured ones.

Why is tenure-based compensation an efficient use of dollars in primary education but not elsewhere?

If unions aren't strong in your state generally, then teacher's unions are no different. Too many people jump on teachers in New Jersey making $100K at the end of their career as an excuse to not even try to aim above the bottom of the barrel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com